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Keith Weissman and Steven Rosen Are PhDs and Middle East Experts Who Did Some Lobbying. They Thought They Were Doing What Washington Insiders Always Do. Thomas O’Donnell didn’t reveal his job when he phoned Keith Weissman in 2004 and got the policy analyst’s wife. He says he didn’t want to scare her. When Weissman returned the call and found out O’Donnell was an FBI agent, his first reaction was to attempt a joke: “What did I do?” “I’m sure you didn’t do anything,” O’Donnell told him. He wanted to meet that day, for five or ten minutes, and get Weissman’s...

Few editorials have generated as much heated debate as rapidly as the recent article from Brookings Institution scholars Mike O'Hanlon and Ken Pollock in the New York Times titled "A War We Just Might Win." The piece is the result of their extended visit to Iraq and discussions with military and political leaders there, which have led them to conclude that the Bush surge and some of the associated strategy changes are actually advancing our objectives in Iraq more than many expected or are aware of here in the US, especially in the media. In coverage of the articles and...

“The Interpreter”: Sean Penn’s U.N. Mash Note April 22, 2005 By Debbie Schlussel The last time I wrote about Jeff Spicoli a/k/a Sean Penn, he sent me an e-mail calling me the c-word. In the past, Penn reportedly shot reporters with a squirt gun filled with his urine, so I got off easy. Classy guy. I critiqued Penn’s absurd interview in the thankfully defunct Talk Magazine. It was just months after 9/11, and Spicoli was deluded from smoking too much pot, again. He didn’t just insist that President Bush, Rupert Murdoch, Howard Stern, and Bill O’Reilly were as bad as...

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered. The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went...

BOOKS OF THE TIMES | 'THE PERSIAN PUZZLE' Kenneth M. Pollack's last book, "The Threatening Storm" (2002), made the case for invading Iraq a lot more eloquently than the Bush administration ever did and helped persuade some moderates who might not otherwise have supported the war to get behind it. In that book, Mr. Pollack argued not only that the United States should depose Saddam Hussein but also that it should go to war "the right way" - by dealing with Al Qaeda and the war on terrorism first, by restarting the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and by building a large...

(Athens, GA) -- A star player for the University of Georgia football team is turning down an offer from "Playboy" to pose for a picture for the magazine's All-American football team. David Pollack, a defensive end who helped propel Georgia to it's first SEC championship in 20 years, says his religious beliefs are at odds with the magazine's content. Pollack told the "Atlanta Journal-Constitution" that he is honored by the invitation, but can't square it with his faith. In Pollack's words, "when you talk to somebody about living their lives the right way and abstaining from sex until marriage, posing...

Clinton’s chief Iraq expert announces his reluctant belief that an invasion is needed. I want to take the unusual step of discussing a book that I have only partially read. I do this because I believe that it is likely to be a book of utmost public importance. In effect, I am inviting you to pick up this book along with me to see if it delivers on its extraordinary promise. The book is The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq, by Kenneth Pollack. The book's importance rests, in part, on the fact that Pollack was a member of...